News Corp leads the right from ‘No to division’ to ‘no to diversity’

This past week, post-referendum, News Corp has been eager to prove here in Australia a thesis that now-moderate Republican Mitt Romney was simultaneously promoting in the US: it’s not the party, but the right-wing media that drives the radicalisation of conservative politics. 

Freed from the discipline of an impending vote, it’s been all culture wars all the time over at News Corp. From the tabloid horror in The Daily Telegraph of Indigenous footballers withholding their voice from the national anthem, to soon-to-be Fox board member Tony Abbott’s mid-week “think-piece” in The Australian on junking the Aboriginal flag and Welcomes to Country.

From the outside, it looks like a dramatic pivot from the campaign’s “No to division” to a more audacious “no to diversity”.  But it’s a pivot more in rhetoric than in intent — from “the false banner of equality, unity and supposed anti-racism”, as Uluru Dialogue member Eddie Synot said, to an overt reassertion of an overweening settler supremacy. 

Although the statement from First Nations peoples criticised the right’s leaders, it called out the primary problem: the meshing of right-wing media and think tank infrastructure: “Lies in political advertising and communication were a primary feature of this campaign … This shameful victory belongs to the Institute of Public Affairs, the Centre for Independent Studies and mainstream media.”

According to the Nine mastheads, an earlier draft had pinpointed the role of News Corp. “Yes campaigners divided,” shrieked The Sydney Morning Herald, showing it had learnt precisely nothing from its failures in the campaign or the challenges it has in better serving its overwhelmingly Yes-voting readership in Sydney’s north and east.

In the US, CNN was reporting that a new book had Romney being more specific, describing the Murdochs’ Fox network as a “dangerous propaganda factory detached from reality, poisoning the minds of its inhabitants”.

Welcome to the Lachlan era of the Murdoch dynasty, where the company’s response to the Voice proposal — before and after October 14 — tells us what to expect. His first big decision? Nominating Abbott, one of the populist right’s pre-eminent culture warriors of the past quarter century, to the cushy sinecure that is the Fox board.

It’s a big marker of intent. Lachlan’s father Rupert regularly had a coterie of retired conservative figureheads on his boards. They tended to the old-style, Trump-sceptical right — like Romney’s VP pick Paul Ryan or former Spanish PM (and Iraq War enthusiast) José María Aznar. 

Lachlan has picked as his political board consigliere an enduring activist, long embedded in the global populist right. While the CVs of most of the director candidates up for election at next month’s Fox AGM highlight their business and media experience, Abbott’s focuses on his right-wing activism: “The board of trustees of the Global Warming Foundation since 2023, the advisory board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship since 2023, the council for the Australian War Memorial since 2019, and the board of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation since 2016.” 

Abbott could have added, as his website does, that he was a recent speaker at Hungarian right-wing think tank the Danube Institute. 

Since being kicked out of Parliament by his Yes-voting electorate, Abbott has gone back to his roots in right-wing activism. Now, with the Fox directorship, he’s positioned as the key link between right-wing media, local organisations such as Advance Australia, and global populist networks. Expect to read a lot more of his thoughts in News Corp’s mastheads.

As for the younger Murdoch, it looks like he’s flipping the family media schtick: where 20th century Rupert (like his father before him) embraced culture wars to sell the news, it seems the 21st century Lachlan intends to embrace the media to sell the culture wars. 

It’s a global culture war with a peculiarly colonial context. It’s about reimagining today’s Australian community out of a narrow colonial nationalism that sees Australia’s rise as “a new Brittania in another world”, as the journalistic founder of the settler myth William Charles Wentworth versified two centuries ago.   

It’s a narrative in which News Corp’s thinking is deeply rooted. The company’s flagship, after all, was named for Wentworth’s 1824 paper The Australian, even adapting the look and all-caps of the earlier masthead’s design. 

Following Wentworth, it’s a narrative that legitimises the modern economy of extractive export industries by glorifying pioneering farmers and diggers. But it’s a weak imagining, held up by the emptiest of symbols — so weak it cannot co-exist with the coloniser’s shame of the dispossession of First Nations peoples.

As the reign of the narrative’s greatest booster, John Howard, was petering out in 2007, Paul Keating identified its weakness: the “we” that Howard often spoke of “was not meant to be all of us, but only some of us. And the ‘some of us’ are the people Howard believes are the keepers of the Holy Grail; the sentries at the gates of the true Australia.”

Those sentries have long found a comfortable barracks in the commentary sections at News Corp. Since the Voice vote, they’ve pivoted their war against cosmopolitan urban elites who voted Yes for an enlarged imagining of Australia.